I suppose I should say something about Le Huffington Post Québec, the new website that is supposed to, as Patrick White writes, “transformer la vision du monde des Québécois.”
It launched this week amid what’s been called “controversy”. It’s funny how easy it is to create a controversy. Just get one person to write something on a blog or in a column, have a bunch of people post links to it on Twitter and Facebook, and then get journalists to ask them for their reaction. Voilà: a controversy.
In the case of the Huffington Post, it started with a blog post from Voir’s Simon Jodoin, accusing people of volunteering their services as writers for the sole profit of the giant AOL empire. (A feeling echoed by La Presse’s Nathalie Collard.) The fallout from that led to some people who had agreed to blog for free (notably Québec solidaire’s Amir Khadir) to change their minds. But not all.
The word “controversy” appears in many stories about HuffPost Québec. The Gazette, Les Affaires (and again), Radio-Canada (and its Triplex blog), CTV, Canadian Press, Branchez-Vous. Bad PR, for sure, but Arianna Huffington dealt with it well when she was surrounded by journalists jumping over each other to talk to her.
(You can read more about Le Huffington Post at Projet J, which visited its offices and covered its launch.)